Lunching at Laura's

by Claire Rayner

  Paul looked at him and frowned and said nothing, and went, leaving Joel staring at the closed door and wondering why he had behaved so absurdly. It really was getting to be ridiculous, to be so obsessed with a woman that it made him as obsessed with her relations. And he shook his head at himself and rang the bell again. There was still a hell of a lot of work to get through.

  21

  ‘No, no, no,’ Maritza said loudly and then started again, her voice rising every time she uttered the word. ‘No, no, NO!’

  ‘What d’you mean, no?’ Viktor blustered. ‘I tell you, I’m the gaffer here. It’s my business, my name on the deeds, you got nothing to do with it. Anyway, why no? Ain’t it time we had a better life? Ain’t it time we had a bigger place to live in, spent a bit of our hard earned money, enjoyed life a bit? What’s so terrible a man wants to retire to the old country, take care of his wife in her old age?’ He became pathetic and leaned over towards her, eyes moist, as she sat straight and angry in her high backed chair by the window.

  She turned her head away with an expression of distaste on her face at his breath, richly scented with his lunch and the bottle of wine he had had as a little mid-afternoon something and he pulled back, offended.

  ‘Listen!’ he roared. ‘If you want to be stupid, so be stupid. I’m here telling you what’s doing. I’m selling the place, okay? I’m getting a good price from these people. I offered ’em they should have just the kitchen space but that ain’t enough. They want the lot and I tell you they’ll give me a price for it, a price like you never saw.’

  ‘How much?’ she said sharply and he leaned back away from her even more.

  ‘That’s not a woman’s business,’ he said flatly. ‘The discussions between me and my business colleagues is my discussions. It ain’t to do with you.’

  ‘It’s everything to do with me,’ she flared at him. ‘It’s my business too. Haven’t I worked and worried my fingers to the bone these last years to make this place what it is? Wasn’t it my savings got the place going to start with? And what about my children, hey? You! You might as well not be a father the way you go on, the little you care! This business is for the children, for all of them, for –’

  ‘For your bloody Zolly!’ he howled and lumbered to his feet and began to march up and down the cluttered little room, clearly whipping up his anger even more. ‘You and your lousy Zolly, I tell you it’s enough to make a man spit, he’s turned out by his wife in favour of his stinkin’ son-in-law! It ain’t natural! That’s what it ain’t. It ain’t natural – and –’

  She still sat there very straight and then said softly ‘What did you say?’

  He was still, now. He had reached the window and was standing with his back to it so that his bulk was outlined in the late afternoon light, but his face was shadowed.

  ‘I said, it ain’t right,’ he muttered, worried now. Maritza shouting was one thing; Maritza quiet was a very different and much more alarming kettle of carp.

  ‘You make me sick!’ she said then, and turned her head away so that she need not look at him. ‘Sick, you hear me? You and your nasty little mind and your nasty little ideas – sick –’

  ‘Listen, I didn’t mean no –’ he began uneasily and then started blustering again. ‘Listen, it’s all your fault! You nag and push a man so, you make me say things I don’t mean. I do say you make too much of that lousy Zolly. I didn’t mean no more than that – just you listen to him too much.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t I? Isn’t it him who keeps this place doing so well? Isn’t it him who works and struggles and then works some more to keep it all going? Without him and Magda, God bless them both, there’d be no Hallascz’s and you wouldn’t be able to sit and get drunk every afternoon with your stupid friends the way you do, you and that Miklos and Janos and Yves and – pshht!’ And the sound of disgust that came from her lips echoed in the little room.

  ‘And why shouldn’t she work, Magda? Ain’t she getting the benefit? The others, they don’t get what she does, Istvan and –’

  ‘Istvan!’ Maritza cried. ‘Istvan! If you aren’t complaining about Zolly who cares so much for us and for this business we’d be on the street without him, then you’re going on about Istvan. He’s rotten, you know that? Rotten – I should have known he’d turn out this way, I should have known, I should never have – ah, pshht!’ And this time the sound she made was different, hopeless and dull and deeply unhappy.

  ‘Never have what? The only boy we got, you should never have loved and looked after? The only boy after three girls in this house and you regret him?’

  She turned now to look at him, and her eyes were dark in their deep sockets. She looked deeply weary and suddenly miserable and he stood there with his face still shadowed and felt his throat tighten at the sight of her.

  ‘Listen, dolly,’ he said and came lumbering towards her and knelt in front of her. His knees creaked audibly but he ignored that and set his big hands on her rather twisted gnarled ones. Her arthritis had been getting much worse lately, and that it contributed to her bad temper was something they both knew, though they never spoke of it. ‘Listen, dolly. I don’t want no trouble for us! What’s gone is gone, and all we got now is tomorrow. I want we should enjoy what we got left. I ain’t so young no more. Nor are you. Seventy six I am already. And you –’

  ‘I don’t need reminding how old I am,’ she said tartly.

  ‘So who’s reminding? I just want we should spend a few years decent. A nice little farm, a few horses –’

  ‘Horses!’ She gave a little snort of laughter. ‘What do you know about horses? When Abel told me, horses – I laughed, you know that? I laughed so loud I was nearly choking. Horses!’

  He got heavily to his feet. ‘So it was Abel started all this.’

  ‘Abel started nothing. I asked him, is all. I just asked him what was going on and thank God he told me. He said horses – such stuff! You can’t sell the children’s business – it’s the family’s! It’s all our past, all we ever worked for, it’s all that we’ve ever done with our lives! How can you sell it, see it all disappear, so you can pretend you’re gentry in Hungary with horses? They’d treat you like a beggar if you try that! You go and buy your farm, sure they’ll take your money, but do you think any of those people will talk to you? Have anything to do with you? You’re dreaming, you old fool, dreaming. Gambling like you always have. You’re throwing away all we’ve got on a chance, or trying to. But I won’t have it. I won’t let you –’

  ‘You can’t stop me,’ he said flatly ‘It’s in my name. I got the control. It’s mine.’

  ‘It’s ours,’ she said fiercely. ‘Yours, mine and the girls – and their husbands. And yes, Istvan and his jumped up Eva as well, it’s even theirs. It’s family, you hear me? I won’t let you give away all we got. And don’t tell me it’s a good price. Whatever price you get, it’s giving away the past. Over forty years we been here. Forty years – it’s a tradition –’

  ‘A tradition!’ he said and laughed loudly, mockingly. ‘Such a tradition. A greasy Zolly working in a lousy back kitchen making lecso, this is a tradition? There’s money to be taken, I tell you, a good price –’

  ‘It’s a tradition,’ she said stubbornly. ‘A working one. We been here forty years – more than forty years – that makes it a tradition. I’m not letting you lose it.’

  ‘You can’t stop me,’ he said and turned and went stamping away to the door and out of it, slamming it behind him as hard as he could, so that the shelves in the cupboards rattled and the glass ornaments on them danced. ‘You can’t stop me!’ he bawled from behind the door panels and she heard him go thumping down the stairs and out of the building.

  It took her a long time to decide what to do, but once she had she moved with great purpose, going heavily downstairs, and across the mid-afternoon quiet of the restaurant to the kitchen.

  Zolly was sitting at the big scrubbed wooden table, shredding marrow on a grater. The light over his head thr
ew the planes of his face into sharp focus and Maritza thought, he looks tired – not wanting to admit that in fact he looked ill. He was thin and his skin was waxy, and his lids were so pale that the darkness of his eyes could be seen shadowy and tense beneath them as he looked down at the grater.

  ‘Zolly,’ she said and he lifted his head and grinned at her.

  ‘Hello, Anya Maritza,’ he said. ‘Come and sit down. I’ll make you some coffee and chollah?’

  She shook her head. ‘No noshing, Zolly, I told you. I got to cut down a bit. Getting too heavy.’ And she patted her round belly and he laughed comfortably and made room on the bench beside him for her to sit down. It was always comfortable for them to be together, and today she sat there feeling peace come back into her, anxious as she was, as she watched his strong fingers flashing up and down the gleaming metal grater, moving steadily and unhurriedly yet getting through the great piles of peeled vegetables at a remarkable speed.

  ‘Best son I’ve got, you are, Zolly,’ she said suddenly and he glanced at her and laughed.

  ‘Son-in-law.’

  ‘For me there’s no difference. Or yes, maybe there is – that you’re better than a son. Better than Istvan, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Viktor don’t think so.’ There was no bitterness in his tone; just a statement of the way it was, like saying, ‘The sun rises in the East.’ ‘Viktor certainly don’t think so.’

  ‘Viktor,’ she said very deliberately, ‘is crazy.’

  ‘Sure,’ Zolly said comfortably and reached for a bowl and tipped the piles of pallid greenish shreds into it, so that he could start grating again.

  ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘Crazy. I’m not just talking, I’m telling you he’s crazy and we have to do something about it. He ought to go somewhere to be treated –’

  The long fingers faltered in their rhythm as he stared at her and then, as he bent his head, picked up their steady movements again, up and down, up and down and the green shreds curled out on the other side in sinuous loops. ‘Like where? Hungary? I hear he’s going to Hungary. With horses.’

  ‘Then you know! How do you know?’

  He laughed then for the first time. ‘Anya Maritza, what do you think I don’t know about what happens here? Doesn’t my bloody life depend on knowing? So I know.’

  She pursed her lips at his swearing, but without any real anger. ‘So you see what I mean. He’s crazy.’

  ‘Is it crazy to want to retire? Not so crazy.’

  ‘Crazy to cut off his whole family with nothing. Crazy to put someone else’s wanting to build a new place before protecting his own old place. That is crazy,’ Maritza said flatly. ‘And I know what I have to do about it.’

  ‘It’s in his name, the place? Then what can you do? Don’t you think I’ve thought about it? Thought hard? Where do I go if this happens, hmm? What happens to me and Magda and young Zolly and Tibor if he does this, hmm? Do you think I don’t worry?’

  ‘No more worrying,’ Maritza said and leaned closer to him. ‘Just tell Magda what I’m telling you. And I’ll talk to Zsuzske and Kati –’ She stopped then and pursed her lips again in that calculating way. ‘Maybe you can talk to Kati. Maybe we don’t need Kati. I’ll think about that. But you tell them – Magda and Zsuzske – what I explain. You tell ’em, you see? That Viktor, the poor old poppa, he’s ill, he’s got crazy notions. We don’t want to have to do it but we must protect him against himself. So we arrange it all, he goes to the hospital, the loony bin. We sign the papers and there he sits –’

  Now the fingers did stop moving. ‘You’d do that?’ Zolly said and there was awe in his voice. ‘You’d have him put away? How can you do that?’

  ‘It’s easy. I tell ’em, the doctors, I tell ’em he’s crazy, they should come and see him. And they come and he screams and shouts and they listen at the way he carries on and they say, “Yes, this man is very crazy.” And they agree.’

  ‘You’d have him locked up in a madhouse just because he wants to sell this place?’ Zolly was still staring at her, awestruck. ‘I never thought this of you, Anya Maritza. Never thought I’d hear you say such a thing. What would he do in such a place? He’d go really crazy, poor old Viktor, in a madhouse. I couldn’t do it to him.’

  ‘You won’t have to,’ Maritza said and reached out with her gnarled hand and shook his arm. ‘Don’t be a fool. Of course he won’t have to. But if he thinks he has to –’

  Zolly sat up and stared at her for a little longer and then bent his head back to his vegetable marrows. ‘If he thinks it,’ he said flatly. ‘Okay, so he thinks it. Then what?’

  ‘Then he does what I tell him, to stop it happening,’ Maritza said and her voice was triumphant. ‘He thinks if he don’t do as I say, he goes to a madhouse. If all of you, Magda and Zsuzske, agree – and you’ve got to, because this is your business we’re talking about, your future, your money – then Viktor has to do what we say. And he’ll sign the papers. Ten years I’ve had those papers ready, ten years, you know that? The lawyers, they got them all fixed up for me ten years ago, a real Family Trust. Like the Rothschilds have and like the Damonts and the Montefiores, all those really rich people. And the Halasczs. They’ll have the same. A family trust –’ She sat and contemplated the idea for a long moment, her eyes shining in the glow of the big overhead lamp. ‘All this time he’s said he wouldn’t. Wanted it all for Istvan, didn’t want no one but Halasczs should have a share, but he has to understand now, his daughters matter more than Istvan. Even Kati –’ And she sat and stared with her deep dark eyes at her plans for her girls. ‘And now I got a way at last I can force him to sign.’ She shook her head, suddenly reminiscent. ‘The times he’s come so close, when he’s been drunk and happy, and when he’s been drunk and unhappy – but always he wriggled out. Now he’s got to. You see, Zolly? If you do like I say and the girls do too –’ And she nodded again, sapiently. ‘I tell you, they’ll do it. Tell him they will, that is. And he’ll sign and you can stop fretting over the future. It’ll be yours.’

  ‘Everybody’s,’ Zolly said quietly and looked up at her and she looked at him, at those pale eyelids and the waxen cheeks and reached out and touched his face.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re a good boy, Zolly. Not greedy. A good boy. Yes, it’ll be for everybody.’

  ‘Kati and Zsuzske and Magda and Istvan,’ Zolly said, still sitting and staring at her.

  She took a deep breath. ‘It’ll have to be,’ she said and her voice was angry now. ‘That I know I can’t make him shift in. It’ll have to be. For my part, the way Istvan wastes money, behaves like he’s God knows who, for my part, I’d leave him out. No, don’t look at me that way. I’d leave him out. Why shouldn’t I? Hasn’t he given me nothing but misery and headaches from the very start, from the time he was a baby? Wasn’t he born in misery and –’

  ‘Hush,’ Zolly said. ‘Hush, Anya Maritza. Don’t say things you’ll be sorry you said.’

  ‘I’ll never be sorry,’ she said loudly angry, but he knew and smiled at her.

  ‘All right, Anya Maritza. If it’s the only way, that’s what we do. I won’t like it and he –’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve got it in me to feel very sorry for Poppa Viktor. He’ll never get over it. You know that?’

  She got to her feet, leaning her bent hands heavily on the scrubbed boards of the table. The lamplight picked up the silver glints in her hair and she seemed for a moment to have a halo.

  ‘And I’ll never get over it if we don’t do it. It’s him or me. And you, and the others. And young Zolly and Tibor and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren you’ll have one day. It’s for the tradition, you know that. Forty years and more we’ve been here. He got the place with a lousy piece of his stupid gambling, but we’re not going to lose it that way. I’m saving it for you. All of you.’

  She had reached the door by now and she looked back at him and smiled. ‘All right, Zolly? You’ll remember what you have to do?’

  ‘Am I likely to forg
et?’ he said dryly. ‘It isn’t every day I agree to lie my own father-in-law into a madhouse.’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ Maritza said confidently. ‘Don’t you worry yourself. No madhouse, but a Family Trust. What else are families for but to trust each other?’ And she laughed and went out and the door swung behind her, and went on swinging as he sat and stared at it and listened to her feet go heavily up the stairs.

  22

  ‘Lunching at Laura’s?’ Preston said as he pulled out his chair and sat down. ‘How did you manage that? And I thought you said last time you didn’t like the way people gossiped when they saw you on your own patch?’

  ‘Now it don’t matter who sees us,’ Davriosh said and pushed forward his glass ready to be refilled as Maxie came to take the new arrival’s drinks order. ‘The man who’s doing all the background for me, he won’t be here, and he’s the only one I have to worry about now. I don’t want anyone to know about him, but otherwise it don’t matter no more. As for how I managed it –’

  He grinned and tilted his head towards the desk in the corner where Laura was standing talking animatedly to one of her customers. ‘Sure she tried to keep me out – took a scunner the way she does. But I know how to fix that. I came in here at ten o’clock this morning. I don’t phone, I come in well before she gets her book full and I stand there and tell her I have to have a table for one o’clock. That’s what I did and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it, was there? Not with the blank pages there. I know she’d rather save her tables for the fancy characters she gets in here than have the likes of me – she wants her politicians and the film people and the famous faces. Look over there – see who that is? That woman from the telly – does all the interviews. And that one over there – that’s the designer Rhoda Packard – very famous she is. Not sure who she’s with, but I think they’re from Remingtons. I hear on the grapevine she’s involved in some big new musical for Drury Lane if they can get it. And over there –’